Mobile Ordinary Gestures

As I explained few months ago, I'm working on a follow-up to the "Curious Rituals" project. The project focuses on an anthropological perspective on smartphone usage. It's basically a visual ethnography approach and I recently collaborated with Constance Delamadeleine (from Geneva-base design studio Future Neue) to publish this Print-On-demand booklet that describes a typology of gestures and postures adopted when using smartphones. It can be seen as an intermediary steps between the field research and the writing/crafting of a much more text-based documents... which I'm working on currently.

The book can be found at the following URL.

Strange hand “choreographies” + mobile phones

Screen Portraits by Anna Pinkas:

"Each video in this series was shot on the New York City subway and captures a passenger’s interaction with his/her phone. The video has been edited frame-by-frame to call attention to the strange hand “choreographies” that our constant use of handheld screens has engendered."

Why do I blog this? An intriguing project that's related to my "Curious Rituals" project. I like the focus on the hands themselves and the way the movement is represented. It allows to highlight specific gestural aptitudes related with digital artifacts such as phones.

It's also intriguing to stumble across this roughly at the same time as Facebook's "Photos of hands holding various phones, to be used in any presentation of your designs." (which are far less inspiring).

Visioconference-while-walking

Some serious business going on here: a Facetime-enabled visioconference operated while walking (seen in Geneva, Switzerland). Verbal and non-verbal communication in the context of a heated debate on a subject I could not parse because of my lack of knowledge of this language.

Why do I blog this? Such situation is nonetheless utterly fascinating as a curious rituals happening these days (with or without a selfie-stick). The "private bubble" located in the public sphere in a new way with different instruments.

Curious Rituals: Double-Selfie

The curious gesticulation that leads to a double selfie.

Why do I blog this? I started a follow-up project to "Curious Rituals" focused on the usage of smartphones.

'Curious Rituals' at Future Fiction (Z33)

Future Fiction is an exhibit currently held at Z33 (Hasselt, Belgium). Focused on "world-building", it explores "how contemporary artists, designers and architects relate to future thinking and imaging". The projects presented there highlight how they can uncover, map, criticize or question the parameters that shape our future. The list of participants is quite impressive: Neïl Beloufa (FR), Nelly Ben Hayoun (FR), Blueprints for the Unknown (UK), Bureau Europa (NL) / Lara Schrijver (NL), Dept. Architectuur UHasselt (B), Theo Deutinger (AT), Dunne & Raby (UK), FoAM (BE), El Ultimo Grito (ES), Arne Hendriks (NL) / Monnik (NL), Shane Hope (US), Speedism (B/DE), Near Future Laboratory (CH/SP/US), Hans Op de Beeck (B), Pantopicon (B), The Extrapolation Factory (DE/US), Atelier Van Lieshout (NL), Chris Woebken (DE), The Xijing Men (JP/CN/KR), Liam Young (AU).

As described in their mini-catalogue (pdf):

"Z33 wishes to draw attention to what future thinking and imaging can be. Not pretending to know what our future will be, nor which inventive solutions will solve our present-day problems, we rather aim to explore a set of different visions/fictions that artists, designers and architects put forward using different methods and tools for future thinking and visualizing. [...] the fictions are of course not completely out of touch, nor are they pure fantasies. The visions explore and/or extrapolate certain societal, economic, political, cultural or scientific evolutions. Based on these extrapolations, artists, designers and architects create."

Karen Verschooren who curated the exhibit contacted us at the Near Future Laboratory last year in order to show Curious Rituals; which is featured there with a video of the design fiction project we did back in 2012 with students from the Media Design Program at Art Center in Pasadena (Nancy Kwon, Katie Myiake and Walton Chiu). 

photo (c) Kristof Vrancken / Z33 (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

photo (c) Kristof Vrancken / Z33 (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

Thanks Karen and Z33 to present our work in such good company!

Street IP address

An IP (Internet Protocol) address written on the wall of this building in Geneva, Switzerland. A new kind of graffiti ? An awkward reminder ? A weird joke ? A curious ritual anyway.

Update: my friend Hannes Gassert, on FB, commented on this by saying something that makes it's even more intriguing:

That's not an address, that's a subnetwork definition ("mask"), the /24 indicating a network with 255 possible participants. Usually that's used with 192.168.1.0, so this is one off, for some reason. This notation was introduced with a network architecture that is called classless, so this might very well the most nerdy propaganda for small, classless societies ever encountered. Or, as the name of that notation is CIDR and it's a bit off, someone just might have had a bit too much cider.

Lucky charm assemblage

A fascinating assemblage – a five Swiss francs coin duct taped to a calculator – spotted at a bubble tea place in Lausanne few weeks ago. When asked about the meaning of this, the waiter told me that "the owner is from Taiwan and she's quite superstitious"... which is a good explanation for this coin-based lucky charm that I found interesting.

Why do I blog this? I like the low-tech character of this obviously, and lucky charms are generally low-tech, but the combination of plastic, duct-tape and metal is very interesting. I wonder about similar approach with smartphones, laptops and other digital artefacts. Are we going to see smart-watches turned into lucky charms with weird materials? Seing this, I'm pretty convinced that it's going to be the case.